Some Thoughts about Brexit

I haven’t previously blogged about Brexit. Partly, that is because there have been so many column inches on the subject that it is tough to find something original to say. The Economist and Guardian have been stuffed with Brexit articles ever since Cameron promised the referendum. The general tone has been of despair and “I told you so”, as well as plenty of introspection about deeper causes and the British character.  There has been a lot of good stuff, and a lot of more thoughtless or mundane material and of repetition.

Still, I am British and the relationship with the EU can be argued to have dominated the politics of my country for my whole life, so I can’t just ignore the subject. I have come up with four thoughts.

Firstly, to understand Brexit supporters, I recall my mum and her beloved Daily Mail.

My mum was born in 1930 to an aspiring working class family. She was fed a constant ‘Brexit diet” throughout her life. Her education featured pink maps and suggestions of British superiority. She endured the war and was led to believe of the special wonder of the Queen and of Churchill. She was suspicious of the black faces that started appearing in the 1960’s. She always lived in genteel towns that suffered gradual declines and were prone to nostalgia. As a Daily Mail reader, like most of her friends, every day saw headlines ridiculing the EU and targeting foreigners, either as benefit scroungers or job stealers or criminals or culture destroyers.

It is no surprise that my mum was a typical patriotic Brexiteer. She died four years before the referendum but there is no doubt which way she would have voted. She was a bit incurious, did not have a top education, and was rather over credulous of easy excuses, but she was a typical product of her time and not worthy of hate of disdain.

I remember this when I struggle to understand how Brexit was voted for. Nearly all of the people associate with would never have voted to leave. Many would be quick to condemn exit voters as dumb and worse, racist or even fascist. Judged by modern standards, my mum might have been a bit of all of those things, but, given her circumstances, it would have been unusual if she had been anything else. We should not blame my mum or people like her. The ones who should have known better were people like Paul Dacre and Boris Johnson.

I try to use similar thoughts when I try to understand how Trump became US president. I find it helpful; it stops me casting hate too readily.

My second thought is that Brexit is most consequential for Ireland.

I buy neither that the UK economy will enter a tailspin as a result of Brexit, nor that Britons will somehow be cut off from Europe and have to sacrifice their holidays and Brie. We were OK before the joining EU and will be OK after leaving it, although Brexit is undoubtedly a negative and the transition may be tough, and politics will remain a mess for some time. But doomsday stuff never rang true and was seen through during the campaign.

For me, the strongest argument is that living in peace with neighbours is a winning strategy for humanity, and, even without thoughts of economics, this should have been enough to keep us in. But perhaps that is rather a woolly and remote argument for people struggling to get through the week.

Ask most English people what the Brexit arguments are, and they will barely mention Ireland. But this is where many consequences lie. Sadly, the British have ignored or belittled Ireland for hundreds of years, and caused much suffering as a result, especially to the Irish.

It was inevitable that the exit negotiations would get stuck at what is called the Irish Backstop. The Republic is in the EU. Northern Ireland won’t be, if Brexit goes ahead. The hard Brexit brigade insist on escaping from the rule of free movement – remember, for my mum and her ilk, immigration is the dominant argument – and a consequence is no fully free trade either. So either Northern Ireland stays in the EU or its custom union, which cannot be accepted by Unionists since it is a big step towards a united Ireland, or a full land border between North and South must be reinstated, the first step back towards conflict and disastrous for the both parts of the Irish economy.

None of this was avoidable, yet the British carried on regardless until the buffers were hit. This also happened in the famine of the 1840’s and more recently in the Troubles. I lived in Belfast for a time in the 1980’s and saw first hand how an unsustainable policy leads to catastrophe. Of course Irish opportunists made things worse, but the root cause was clear.

So I blame Cameron. For political expediency, he has undone the historic work of Tony Blair, and carried on the British tradition of throwing the Irish under the bus. Contrary to lazy English stereotypes, the Irish are smart, witty and internationally popular. They will win the tactical battles, and even the long-term strategic ones, but it will be ordinary Irish people who suffer along the way, as usual.

My third thought is about the British character. It is really just an excuse to share some of the column inches I have admired. We already can deduce a lot about the British character by considering the evidence of the first two thoughts.

I read a nice quote from a Danish politician who claimed that Europe only had two types of nations, small ones and ones that haven’t yet realised they are small. This does indeed explain a lot about Britain’s history with the EU, from its initial reluctance to join to its suspicious behaviour as a member and now its readiness to leave recklessly. We really haven’t yet come to terms with the reality that world maps aren’t pink any more.

But my favourite article about Brexit and the British character was in the Guardian Weekly back on 30 November. Fittingly, it was by a witty Irishman, Fintan O’Toole, in an extract from a longer essay entitled Heroic Failures. The British are portrayed as paranoid masochists, many of whom are so traumatised by the 1940’s that the only alternative to domination that they can envisage is subordination. The article is full of wit and of wisdom, even if full of generalisation. The descriptions certainly fit my mum though.

This inability to accept harmonious partnership may be a common theme in declining great powers. I predict similar issues in the US over the next generation or two.

My final thought is that I don’t see an easy exit from the mess we have reached.

With no parliamentary deal in sight, I trust that May will seek to delay Brexit day, maybe for as much as a year, and that the EU and opposition will gladly agree. But then what? The Brexit brigade will cry betrayal and stir up yet more distrust of elites, and in any case a second referendum would be hard to formulate and create more division. So I suspect that there will be a general election later this year under a new Conservative leader, which at least will force Corbyn to articulate a policy. But that may solve nothing either, since for sure a new negotiation with EU would lead to the same impasse, while a decision to stay in for now would keep the Brexit brigade fired up for years to come. So don’t expect this to end any time soon, and not neatly either. The political story that has dominated my life as a Brit will probably outlive me.             

Major Project Management

This month I have enjoyed following the New York press and the excellent morning show on New York 1 TV. There has been much coverage of an apparent reversal in direction for a major subway maintenance project. An important line linking Manhattan to Brooklyn was due to be closed completely for over a year, with all sorts of ramifications. But the MTA clearly did not account for the conquering hero, governor Andrew Cuomo. In December he organised a one-hour visit to the tunnel, and over the New Year he announced that his team had discovered an alternative way to carry out the project and the line could stay open.

This led to some initial good cheer, followed by many questions – New Yorkers never take good news lightly, cynicism always returns quickly. How could the MTA have been so dumb not to have known about this not-so-new technology before? Should we trust a radical fix that Cuomo’s team seems to have come up with so quickly? Why did all the time and money of preparatory work have to be wasted? What about all those people who had already moved house in anticipation of the shutdown, or the landlords who had agreed rent reductions? How was Cuomo able to operate over the heads of the MTA board, when he is usually at pains to point out he does not control it?

This was all good stuff and highly entertaining, but, just like the new Amazon jobs, New Yorkers were being side-tracked onto something they could complain about rather than simply celebrating a positive development.

I enjoyed the story because it recalled my last days in Shell, when somehow I found myself working in its major projects department, responsible for investment projects of billions of dollars, many reminiscent of the MTA L-train tunnel renewal.

That I ended up in major project management, and even found something useful to do there, says many things about me, about Shell and about project management.

About me, I guess it showed that my career had run out of steam and that the lack of a main discipline had finally caught up with me in a company with an engineering culture. I had already signalled my intention to retire early, but it still showed some confidence in me that a position of some consequence was offered, so I guess I had some credibility. Even so, it was quite tough, because the place was absolutely packed with engineers, talking jargon and acronyms that I struggled to understand. I was always one statement away from ignominy.

About Shell, it shows they are a kind employer – I was vulnerable, and they sorted me out. I saw this many times with others, and I found the human decency inspiring, and believe it is rare in corporate life nowadays. It also shows that the company places creativity over discipline – no logical HR process would have supported the move, but it still happened because someone made it happen and leaders trusted people to make things work.

About major project management, it showed what an undervalued discipline it used to be, but also how empty a discipline it is, an apparent contradiction.

Major projects spend billions, kill people, are critical enablers for income streams, and often go badly. Leaders might have the most consequential jobs in their companies. Yet when I joined Shell Global Solutions in 2001, I remember an organisation chart with about 10 VP’s and about 50 direct reports to those VP’s, and the report at the very bottom of the most far right column was the one in charge of major projects. Go figure.

I think part of the reason is that there is so little academic theory of major project management. For most STEM subjects, colleges can devise theory to support bachelors and masters programs and further research. But for major projects, the theory is restricted to a lot of process and protocol, some basic stuff about budget management, and lots of case studies.

In that respect it is very like my home discipline of strategy. In my MBA, I remember the strategy module to consist of a few four box models and many case studies. And strategy is also undervalued, especially in organisations where qualifications count for a lot.

This even affects schools. If there is one thing we all have to learn to do it is to manage projects, from renovating a house to planning a wedding. Those of us who learn to manage projects well have a big advantage in life. But teaching it is wholly absent in school, like so much else that might be useful despite not leading to college research fellowships.

Most of the process in major projects is in preparation. A lot of effort goes into defining extremely clear and detailed goals, and then conducting many reviews to home in on a design and plan that best delivers them, involving the eventual users and owners and all the experts and contactors. It can all take years, before a final execution phase of maybe months.

The key roles are the project manager, who pulls it all together, and someone called the decision executive, representing the owner. A good decision executive understands the business needs and knows how to ask questions. A good project manager is like an orchestra conductor, and the most important attribute is broad shoulders – knowing when to take a personal risk. Most are either risk-averse process managers, or its opposite, cowboys.

In my time in projects, I was supposed to pioneer one new style of review, called target costing, in which cost was modelled as a key constraint rather than an outcome. It could be powerful. On one of the few projects I was able to complete the process, it led to its scrapping, because it became clear that 90% of the benefits could be delivered by 1% of the cost plus a couple of workarounds.

I experienced something very similar at my lovely car workshop yesterday, when I learned I could either fix the occasional floods of rainwater invading my car by investing $500 or by using some duct tape, prayers and towels. My car is barely worth $500, so it was another triumph for target costing and duct tape suppliers.

The practical challenge with all these reviews are the incentives of the key players. The decision executive may not know what questions to ask, and may be motivated by shiny new buildings or avoidance of disaster. The project manager often wants to avoid disaster too, and can shy away from complexity and creativity. Progress towards completion can become paramount too quickly. That is one reason that introducing things like target costing can be tough – it only carries risks for project managers.

All this brings me back to Cuomo and the L-Train. A routine project has just been subject to an extraordinary review from an outsider. It is too late in the process and there has been sunk cost. But essentially Cuomo has challenged the goals, namely the prioritisation of continued service versus cost or other goals. Often these reviews will reveal overlooked opportunities, since the incentives of everyone until now had led to the stifling of creative ideas. It is a good outcome, but not an ideal process. But hey, life sometimes does not follow ideal processes, so well done Andrew, you deserve your uptick in the polls.

I remember the same trade off in Shell when we were rebuilding petrol stations. When the engineers led, the stations had to close during redevelopment, often for ten weeks or more. The upshot was that customers found new habits and it often took years for the new station to become as busy as the old one it replaced. Some smart people intervened, and it became normal practice to keep the place open through the renovation with a couple of pumps. Engineers moaned, but the outcome was better.

Mr Cuomo, while you are at it, could you have a look at the upgrade to the Kew Gardens highway interchange? This complex road junction has been a building site for as long as I’ve lived in New York, six and a half years and counting. I would guess that disruption during the project was not prioritised highly enough among the goals, and a review would reveal ways to finish it more quickly, and to translate that learning into future projects.

A challenge in major project management is to let in such reviews in a timely way, and not so many as to drown projects in bureaucracy. That starts with goals and incentives, and strong decision executives and project managers. These disciplines deserve more consideration, in schools, colleges and companies. I often directed smart and brave young people towards major project management because the opportunities to develop are huge and the limitations few. Procurement and strategy are other fields with those characteristics. If you are looking for an interesting career direction, you could do worse than exploring one of those.           

New Year Moods

The turn of the year can be an awkward time. I must confess to having more miserable memories of New Year’s Eve and of New Year’s Day than happy ones. This year was typical in that respect. On Monday night I became quite grumpy.

New Year has many things working against it. For the Northern Hemisphere, the weather is invariably terrible. The holiday comes straight after another holiday, meaning that some of the obvious activities have already been used up and some of the familial relationships are already strained. It can fall in the middle of the week so does not fit the neat three day weekend pattern of most holidays. And the whole point is for everyone to stay up late, which is fine for people between 16 and 60 but not for those on either side of that range – and most families have plenty of both the old and the young.

Childhood memories of New Year are not good. My parents did not throw or get invited to parties and we did not have a large extended family, so we tended to sit at home and watch TV and try to pretend that we were really wide awake in anticipation, before working out the earliest socially acceptable time to go to bed after midnight. The TV choices were always truly terrible, with review programs interspersed with specials that were too bad to play at Christmas, and topped off with Scottish dancing. I guess that set me up for a lifetime of self-fulfilling expectations of grumpiness.

New Year in Scandinavia was a rare joy. Nordic people do rituals well. New Year involved plenty of drinking and some dancing, but not too much or with too much loud music. Many hosted a barbecue, typically crazy given the usual temperature, and there were lots of fireworks. Somehow the expat crowd was a good size for such gatherings and most people I knew seemed to be in the magic 16-60 age window.

By contrast, New Year in Holland was a nightmare. I positively hated it and dreaded it. A generally sober and organised people went collectively barmy, and the place became a war zone for the night. Everywhere else, fireworks involve large organised shows plus some stuff in back gardens, but in Holland it means every seven year old hurling small fireworks with abandon, ideally under passing cars. Restaurants responded by closing at eight and buses stopped running at nine, while driving meant dodging the terrorists. The only hope was a party invite within walking distance.

Last Monday night was rather typical of our US New Year’s experience. We went for an early evening trip to the old folk’s home where we volunteer, to help with their New Year party. It is cute: they organise a ball drop for 7pm, so that the old folk can enjoy a glass of champagne and even a wheelchair dance, yet still get to bed close to their normal time.

That left us free to drive to New Jersey to the party of the sister of the wife of the brother of my wife, a gathering of more than fifty in a small house. Philippine reunions always feature many kids, lots of food, karaoke (absent this time), problems with remembering the names of close relatives, and two or three lolas (grandmothers) who sit proudly on sofas pointing out which of the assembled throng are their offspring. We like that branch of the family very much, and try to spend time with my brother-in-law whenever they visit from Canada. The kids always bond well, but for the adults there is not much chance to enjoy a quiet chat amid the mayhem.

This year I was grumpy before I even got there, on account of a horrible drive in heavy rain. Visibility was shocking, not helped by our ageing car's foibles, but mainly due to terrible US highway street lighting. I also have to confess to a difficult new relationship with Waze, the route finding app. I have always been a GPS refusenik, preferring to use old-fashioned guides like maps and directions and compass points. OK, I know that is weird. But recently I have come to accept that Waze has some limited uses, for example when lost or when there are multiple possible routes and possible heavy traffic. Finding the house of these relatives did not qualify, but my wife typed in the address anyway, and Waze started to talk to me. Because of an accident on the Cross Bronx (nothing new there), it kept trying to direct me away from the obvious (and, in the conditions, safest) route.

Despite the best intentions of the weather, the car, and (especially) Waze, we arrived, and I had the good sense to choose to find a bedroom to lie down in for twenty minutes, since otherwise my sharp tongue might have ruined various family relationships beyond repair.

I emerged in better humour, to enjoy great food and some warm wine – not as much as I would have liked, aware of the drive home. I managed to chat with my lovely in-laws as much as space and prevailing noise level allowed. But then I noticed it was only 10pm, so I found myself on a sofa half watching network TV. Wow, it made Scottish dancing seem good! At least the dancers were not interrupted by terrible adverts every five minutes. The hosts were in Times Square, wet, wet, wet, and pretending to be having the time of their lives, introducing a series of tired acts performing tired songs with no passion. Diana Ross looked liked she had endured dozens of facelifts, and that more or less defined everyone – they were celebrities failing to be remotely authentic, just as celebrities tend to, all the time. I looked around the room and saw many people doing the same thing, acting, without any authenticity.

Soon after midnight, the TV switched to a lazily written episode of Saturday Night Live, not even live but a recording. The network, exhausted like those poor presenters, was obviously telling us it was time for bed. On my sofa, a distant relative joined me to ask whether Moslems were invading the UK as well as the USA. I was awake enough not to start a fight.

I managed to get the family home safely, including only minor further arguments with Waze, but I still felt grumpy. However, by Wednesday I was struck at how little it took to resume a positive mood. I tuned in to New York 1, and heard how 2018 saw the fewest shooting deaths since 1960 and that annual traffic deaths had reduced from over 300 to under 200 since the mayor launched his Vision Zero campaign. I wonder what they could achieve if they used streetlights.

So, apart from getting a rant off my chest, can I learn from these various New Year experiences? There is a lot. Sometimes it rains, and I should get over it. There is not much maturity in arguing with an app, so I should just work out how I want to use Waze and stick to it. Family is a gift, and deserves more grace than I gave it last Monday evening. Grumpiness is not a good trait.

One realisation is about a contented semi-retired life. I like my routine, and I struggle in times of the year when the routine is disturbed. I like my regular TV shows like New York 1 in the mornings. While it is lovely to have the kids home, it is also lovely to have my routine undisturbed.

There is another realisation about authenticity. I think I already reach out to situations where I can encounter people being unforced, whether in my choice of friends, movies or situations. I can use that realisation, in learning to accept other situations without getting grumpy, and in seeking even more authentic opportunities. Network TV on New Years eve is probably not near the top of the list for those; indeed New Year’s Eve itself is not all that conducive.

Finally, I should come to accept that the magic 16-60 age range will soon no longer include me. Indeed, it won’t be long before I might be the lola character in the room, so I’d better start accepting that, and doing a better job of remembering the names of my relatives.

I wish everyone a peaceful and healthy 2019. I resolve to do a better job at not being grumpy, at least for the first 364 days of it.